


Beautiful Rag Doll

by RetroactiveCon



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Kidnapping, Non-Consensual Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21712138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RetroactiveCon/pseuds/RetroactiveCon
Summary: “Your reputations precede you. I have a number of clients who would pay well for a chance to own Captain Cold or the Flash.” He gives an alarming little chuckle. “Not that either of you will remember those identities.”
Comments: 6
Kudos: 39





	Beautiful Rag Doll

Leonard is considering a weapons upgrade. It’s not that he doesn’t like the cold gun—it is without question the most intuitive, most delightful weapon he’s ever used—but if he is to keep his promise to the Flash, he needs something less lethal. A cold field would be precisely that—nobody will be able to focus if they’re suddenly freezing, but the worst damage they’re likely to sustain is frostbite.

Finding something capable of generating such a cold field is complicated. The core of the gun is capable of generating a sufficient field, but it’s small enough to be seized from the floor and discarded. Besides, Leonard would like to keep his gun intact. It’s useful for shattering things, which saves him time picking locks and cracking codes. He needs something additional. 

It takes weeks of perusing inbound tech inventories before finding something that might work: a device designed to aerosolize a temporary power-dampening serum. It’s the sort of thing Leonard would take off the streets on principle (most metahumans don’t deserve to have their powers stripped away, even temporarily) but with the right modifications, it would be perfect for his cold field. Acquiring it requires a relatively simple heist, which means he can almost certainly anticipate intervention from the Flash. So much the better. He’ll probably be able to convince the Flash to let him take the tech, and it means playtime with his little scarlet speedster. 

Eager as he is to have the Flash interrupt his heist, he doesn’t plan with the diligence he would have displayed six months ago. Instead, he dedicates a mere week to devising a plan. In hindsight, this is where things go wrong. Had he turned his full focus to a successful heist, he could have foreseen the trouble that befalls him. 

On the night of the heist, he arrives at the warehouse to find the Flash already there. The kid jumps about a foot in the air when Leonard purrs, “Well well well, Flash. I might think you were expecting me if this wasn’t such an unusual target.”

“Snart!” The Flash whips around and almost falls on his leather-clad ass. Leonard clucks his tongue in exaggerated disappointment when he doesn’t fall. (He wouldn’t mind getting another glimpse of the kid all sprawled out, long legs splayed and pretty green eyes wide.) “Uh, I—no, I didn’t expect you. I got a…a tip.” 

“A tip,” Leonard drawls. He doesn’t believe it for a second, which means…oh. “My, my, Flash, how very naughty of you. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were here to steal this tech before it ever hit the streets.”

The Flash looks at his boots like a chastened child. Oh, this is just too good. 

“The Flash, a thief.” Leonard knows he’s smirking like the cat that got the canary, but this is an unexpected treat. “Let me guess. It’s ‘for the greater good.’” 

“It is!” He always loves watching the Flash’s temper flare. Perhaps it ought to scare him, all that righteous anger in such a powerful package, but the kid would never let himself lose control. “That tech could be used on all metahumans, not just malicious ones, and then—”

There’s a faint whistle off to Leonard’s left, the whisper of a small projectile splitting the air. A slender metal dart sprouts from the Flash’s neck. At first, Leonard thinks it wasn’t strong enough to pierce the kid’s suit. Then the kid’s big eyes slip out of focus and he staggers. Without thinking, Leonard lunges forward to catch him. The kid’s weight drags him to his knees. He eases him to the ground and lays him on the concrete. 

“Barry,” he whispers. 

The kid struggles to focus on him. “Huh?” 

Another whisper of air. The second projectile hits Leonard in the shoulder. His parka absorbs most of its force; the sharp tip pricks his skin but doesn’t embed deeply. He yanks it out and flings it away. With luck, little of the drug made it into his system; if he can just stay conscious, he’ll be able to watch where they’re taken, see who’s captured them, devise a plan…

His head swims. The floor tilts up to meet him, the concrete cool against his cheek. He tries to roll onto his back and finds that he can’t—his legs are trapped by a warm weight. Warm…red…what is that? He’s barely able to focus on a lightning-bolt insignia that he—does he remember?

“Hush.” A man kneels down beside Leonard. He has a pleasant face, Leonard thinks hazily: soft brown hair, narrow catlike mouth, round apple cheeks like…like whose? “Just sleep.”

Leonard’s eyes close. He can’t remember why he would bother to struggle.

***

Leonard drifts back to consciousness slowly. His thoughts feel slow and muffled, but when he tries, he can remember. The warehouse. The Flash. The drug, and the man who drugged them. Where are they?

It takes a herculean effort to open his eyes. Once he does, he wishes he hadn’t.

Barry is directly opposite him, propped against the wall like a rag doll. His eyes are mostly closed and his mouth is hanging open; he’s clearly still lost in the same drugged haze from which Leonard just woke. More worrisome yet, his Flash suit is gone. He’s dressed in simple, loose-fitting white clothes that make him look like an inmate at a jail or a mental hospital. 

Worry settles like a stone in Leonard’s gut. When he looks down, his fears are confirmed. He, like Barry, is dressed in nondescript white clothes. Barring the immediate revulsion at being undressed while asleep, his biggest fear is the anonymity of the plain white clothes. Places that dress people in such uniforms want conformity. Given the amnesiac effect of the drug they were hit with, it’s entirely possible that in this case, ‘conformity’ will require utterly erasing their personalities. 

“Barry,” he hisses. He wants to crawl over to the kid and wake him, but when he tries to move, his muscles won’t cooperate. It’s all he can do to speak without slurring. “Barry. Wake up.”

The kid’s eyes drift open. He slurs something that might, with some imagination, be “Snart?” Before Leonard can answer, his eyes fall shut again. 

“Barry!” Leonard hisses. 

This time, when the kid’s eyes open, they’re marginally more focused. He glances around and, when his eyes fall on Leonard, struggles to lift his head. “Snart? Where are we?” 

“The dollhouse,” a soft voice interjects. Leonard can’t turn his head to see the speaker, but within a few seconds, he paces into view. It’s the apple-cheeked man from the warehouse. Both of his hands hang by his sides, loosely curled. Either one might hold a syringe or a dart. Leonard tries to tense instinctively only to remember that he can’t move. 

“Like the TV show?” Barry quips. 

The man smiles and kneels down in front of Barry. “Not quite,” he says. There’s a faint lilt to his voice—an Eastern European accent, if Leonard had to guess, although the softness of his vowels suggests a Spanish background. 

“Like a human smuggling operation,” Leonard concludes. He’s pleased to find that, regardless of his drugged motionlessness, his voice is strong. 

The man nods. “Your reputations precede you. I have a number of clients who would pay well for a chance to own Captain Cold or the Flash.” He gives an alarming little chuckle. “Not that either of you will remember those identities.” 

Barry sits forward in a blur. Leonard startles—the kid was hit worse, he shouldn’t have recovered this quickly—but the apple-cheeked man simply presses two fingers to his brow and murmurs, “You’re just a doll.” The light goes out of Barry’s eyes. He falls against the man’s shoulder, as motionless as though he’s been drugged anew. 

“What did you do to him?” Leonard demands. 

The apple-cheeked man glances at him. “Drugs only last so long, and I’ve no intention of selling someone an addict,” he says, as though it’s simple. “But trigger phrases have no lasting effects…not undesirable ones, anyway.” He lays Barry back against the wall, clearly making a show of how pliant Barry is and how he holds any position he’s coaxed into. 

“Is the touching necessary?” Leonard tries to twitch a finger and finds that he can. He braces his palm against the floor. Once a little more control returns to him, he’s going to rip this doll-maker to pieces. 

“It’s useful initially.” The doll-maker turns away from Barry and kneels in front of Leonard. He forces himself to stay still and relaxed despite how dearly he wants to recoil. “In time, both of you will respond to the trigger without the touch, although I suspect whoever buys you will hardly mind the excuse to touch you.” He raises a hand. Leonard presses his head back against the wall, unable to stop himself. Rather than touch his brow as he had Barry’s, the doll-maker skims his fingertips along Leonard’s jaw. “So close to perfection,” he murmurs. “And yet…”

He must use some kind of trigger on Leonard. If he does, Leonard doesn’t remember. When he wakes, he’s staring into a pair of quizzical brown eyes. 

“Huh,” says Cisco. “Somehow, I thought you were invulnerable or something. I never thought you’d get kidnapped.”

“Shocking as this may seem, I’m only human.” Leonard pushes himself into a sitting position. Upon looking around, he finds himself in the Cortex. “…You brought us to STAR Labs to wake us up?”

“Uh, no, we brought you here to deprogram you. Hartley used his flute on some of the other captives and they woke up amnesiac and bewildered, so we figured better for you to wake up bewildered in STAR Labs than some creepy old house.” A little smirk twists Cisco’s lips. “Gotta say, it was fun getting to boss you around and having you listen.”

Leonard makes no direct threats. If Cisco happens to leave his house and slip on some well-placed black ice, he has no one to blame but himself. “Where’s Barry?”

“Uh, he had to go back in a CSI capacity.” Cisco rubs a hand against the back of his neck. “I told him he didn’t have to, y’know, that he was all right if he got scared, but he was insistent.”

Of course he was. The kid is incapable of slowing down, even when he deserves to take time for himself. “Naturally.”

He gets to his feet and finds, to his alarm, that they’re bare. Grudgingly, he asks, “You don’t happen to have a pair of shoes I could borrow…”

“If by borrow you mean ‘steal,’ yeah, I can find something.” When Leonard raises an eyebrow, Cisco defends himself. “You don’t lend things to a thief, man. You just don’t.”

While Cisco locates some appropriate footwear, Leonard finds and pockets the tech that caused so much trouble. After what he’s endured, he refuses to leave without it.

**Author's Note:**

> The villain is loosely based on Professor Pyg - the kind of loosely based that comes from reading a Wiki article, going "now that sounds like a plot," and letting it spin out of control.
> 
> Now with a sequel, [Trigger](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23008357/chapters/55012948).


End file.
